Atheist group at London South Bank University has its FSM display banned for being 'religiously offensive.'

Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones at The Awlcastigates TED for allowing talks that are "blatant pseudoscientific garbage," and get specific. (I know this is from last month, but I just saw it.)

Wednesday is Darwin Day, and there's a naturalselectionpalooza of events all over the place. Our On Campus team has a page full of resources for students. Local branches are doing all sorts of events and activities:

The mood is unforgiving in this north Nigeria metropolis, where nine others accused of being gay by the Islamic police are behind the central prison’s high walls. Stones and bottles rained down on them outside the court two weeks ago, residents and officials said; some in the mob even wanted to set the courtroom ablaze, witnesses said.

Secular Coalition bestows the honor of "Secular Artist of the Month" on Roderick Bradford and our own Tom Flynn for the American Freethought documentary in its weekly call. Want to help spread it around? Tell your local PBS station to air it!

Everyone is scared of the Saudi religious police, but Manal Al-Sharif says there may now be an opportunity to lessen their influence.

Philosophy professor Alvin Platinga has a really bad analogy for an argument for agnosticism over atheism, I think:

[L]ack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars.

Levy County, Florida officials reject an atheist counter-monument to the existing Ten Commandments because "None of the texts on the proposed monument appear to be a reproduction of the entire text of any document or person, as required in the (county) guidelines."

James McGaha and Joe Nickell bring their expertise to the "Valentich disappearance" UFO mystery for Skeptical Inquirer.

In our multicultural democracy, no one conception of faith, spirituality, or belief has right-of-way in taxpayer-funded education. And when our students learn about how the natural world works, the only concepts that should have the right-of-way are evidence-based findings, established theories and laws, and testable hypotheses. If people don’t learn that testability and evidence are essential features of science, they won’t understand whether it’s science they’re being sold because they won’t have a good understanding of what science is.

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Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.

Comments:

#1 Randy (Guest) on Monday February 10, 2014 at 8:01pm

“None of the texts on the proposed monument appear to be a reproduction of the entire text of any document”

That’s their claimed problem with the atheist monument? The commonly known ten commandments are excerpts from larger books (Exodus, Deuteronomy, and for some Mosiah). And there aren’t even ten of them, which is why various religious groups number them at least eight different ways. And rarely do the ten commandments actually include the full text.

#2 Randy (Guest) on Monday February 10, 2014 at 8:06pm

(wish I could edit my comment)
Checking the image of the ten commandments monument at the Levy county courthouse, it does not contain the entire text, even of the ten commandments, much less the books of Exodus or Deuteronomy they are excerpted from.

I noticed how the article about the ‘workers’ in Norway fails to mention the religion (Islam) of those who seem offended at any job activity banned by their beliefs. Apparently this is not just a problem in Norway, but also in the some Islamic nations. Managers in KSA have recently complained that workers allowed time to go to the mosque for the mandatory prayers often never return for the day. Nothing makes a better deadbeat than an insanely devout religious nut.

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Paul Fidalgo has been communications director of the Center for Inquiry since 2012. He holds a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University, and has worked previously for FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Secular Coalition for America. Paul is also an actor and musician whose work includes five years performing with the American Shakespeare Center. He lives in Maine with his wife and kids. His blog at the Patheos network is iMortal, and he tweets at @paulfidalgo.